I'm Illiterate Here (and it's really annoying)

            I’m not illiterate in the real sense of the word; I can read English, Arabic, and some Romance languages.  But I cannot read Hebrew, so I’m functionally illiterate in Israel.  Occasionally, I can match two written words together by looking at the shapes, but that requires having two copies of the same word and that both are in the same font.  Even in the Arab towns, everyone knows Hebrew, so that’s the language that’s used.  For names of stores, for labels, for caution signs.  It isn’t that I expect everything in the world to be labeled in English, but it is a very different experience and way to go about living.  Here are some weird ways that it has affected me thus far (with pictures where I could get them without being strange).

• Grocery Shopping- This is the task that's changed the most. One must go looking for the type of container that something is normally in, looking at the color of what’s inside and the picture on the front, and hope that it’s what you want.  Or ask the guy at the counter, who is usually very helpful and often speaks English.  I'm really thankful that I don't have any severe allergies, because I would have no way to ensure that I wasn't eating something dangerous.

So it looks like corn flakes. With honey

Yes! not only something I recognize, but something that tastes like home.
But apparently the stuff with the blue lid is crunchy.
I'll now have to write my shopping list based on lid colors.

Well, perhaps that'll be good, whatever it is (it wasn't)

Care to guess the brand?
The picture helps, but good luck figuring out the different flavors from a whole display.
Especially if you're picky

Aha!  It's a brand I know, with a picture I know, and at least some of it is written in English.
Brand name recognition is really useful



• Baking - I love to bake, but I was having trouble finding baking soda or baking powder (though I eventually found it).  One day in a grocery store I saw a pillsbury brownie mix, and thought that might be a good way to bake without trying to find ingredients (because I have to have the guy at the counter help me, because I can't read).  I looked at the back to see what you had to add, and promptly realized that this wasn't going to work so well either, due to the fact that the directions were all in Hebrew.  Without any pictures.  On the plus side, I'll learn to make everything from scratch.
• Caution Signs- what does the picture below say?  Is it a political sign or advertisement that got stuck there?  It is a caution sign saying “keep of the rocks”?  Your guess is a good as mine.  Luckily no one yelled at us.

• Directions- If I want to get the bus to go to Nazareth Illit or Kafr Kana (the biblical town of Canaa, by the way), I have to make sure I know the number and which side of the road to stand on.  The bus shelters have signs with the numbers on them to show which buses stop where, and presumably the name of where they're going written under it.  If I get confused, I just have to ask someone and hope that they're nice and helpful.

• Mail- I like to send snail mail, but so far I've been to the Post Office six times, and only succeeded in mailing something once.  Not only do I not know when the post office hours are, I can't read the days of the week on the sign with the hours, so I can only write down the times in a some sort of order, and try to guess at which day is which.  Today they were closed because of a holiday, but fortunately they had a sign in Arabic as well as Hebrew so I could read it and not walk all the way there tomorrow when they will still be closed.

• Signs- I tried to get into the pharmacy at the bottom of the hill this week and the doors had a great big red sign on them.  Perhaps a “do not enter” sign?  Or the name of the store that just happened to look really scary?  Luckily the security guard on the inside waved me through the door.  I’m still not sure if that’s the right place to go in or not.

• Bathrooms- thank goodness for the fairly-standard symbol for ‘restroom’, with the little stick figures, one of which has on a skirt.  However, signs are sometimes just words, which can be rather useless if you can’t read.  One time I and some friends successfully followed the symbols to a door with a little stick figure in a skirt on it.  But then there was a sign on the door, presumably saying that the bathroom was closed for some reason.  (Luckily there was a readable number on the door, so we were able to guess where we needed to go to find another bathroom)

I've always thought that reading was important and the most important part of school, but I never realized how much of my daily life revolves around reading.  I just finished college and want to go into academia, so I do spend time reading scholarly things, like books and journal articles.  I also enjoy reading for fun (since I now have the time), and I even have to read to know what's going on in the world (the news) and in my world of my friends and family (facebook).  An illiterate person is not only excluded from those things, they have to have an entirely different way of coping with daily life.